Geeorge Hahn addresses this. It was in an obnoxious YouTube video.

Kitchen scraps + horse manure + egg shells gets us close.
Hahn recommended some unusual protein sources.
We have some posts on this in EQ's 220 million can't be wrong thread.

The thread is wild fun with a good paragraph from Chuckiebtoo.

Here is a link that might be useful: 220 million can't be wrong

This post was edited by barbararose21101 on Fri, Jan 2, 15 at 10:45

Thanks for the input, Barbara. Watched the video (realized I'd started it in my earlier research but didn't finish it because of the infomercial feel) and read the "220 Million" thread. Good info. The thread brought up another question. I include vegetable/melon/non acidic fruit scraps, horse manure, spent coffee grounds, and pulverized egg shells in my feed stock. I'm not going to use hair or toenails. That's just gross and almost seems like a "think I can get people to do this?" dare. But what about the crab leg shells? Red Lobster goes through lots of those. Would cleaned and pulverized crab leg shells add something of enough importance to mess with it?

Note the video that I probably posted originally is 17:00 minuets too long. I would skip the non highlighted parts. The best review in a nutshell I can do right now is: Starts at 5:50 to 12:20. Not all worm castings are created equal: 15:30 to 16:40.

220 million can't be wrong:
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/verm/msg0503510020479.html

Relates to the topic due to toe nails added to vermicompost.

This post was edited by equinoxequinox on Fri, Jan 2, 15 at 19:54

charitycomposter: IMHO, crab leg shells would be a terrible thing to add to a vibrant, active worm bin. They're gonna lay there a long time (like toenails) and get in your way when feeding, or separating, or removing things like toenails and crab leg shells.

They ain't gonna eat crab leg shells for a loooooong time. Probably longer than a worms life expectancy. Or even a wormers.

Try to restrict inputting things that take lots longer to decompose than a bad credit rating.

chuckiebtoo

I respectfully disagree about the addition of crab shell to an active vermicompost bin or even as a soil ammenment with one caveat ...... It's much more useful and breaks down much faster if its pulverized or turned into a powder.

It's sometimes available as a byproduct of the shellfish industry and sold as a soil amendment called "crab meal". I have even seen that Neptune's Harvest has started selling bags of it as a soil amendment -but unfortunately they have not invested the resources to fully powderize it and instead sell it in the form of mostly smaller chunks of shell. Even the larger shell bits break down rapidly within a few weeks to a month in my bins .... but as in anything - YMMV

In fact, one of the better producers of commercial compost uses crab/lobster shell meal as a vital component in their lines of composts - Coast Of Maine Coddy Lobster Compost

I could of course be completely misguided, missinformed and drawing conclusions from purely anecdotal observations as well as suspect scientific data however ...... IMO, besides my staple " food" additions of various organic raised livestock manures .... both crab meal as well as neem and/or karanja meal are some of the most highly desirable " food" additions within my own vermicompost bins for various reasons. If interested in the possible benefits of such additions to a worm bin... One would be much better informed by making use of a decent search engine like google scholar etc, than having me lamely attempt a useful and understandable explaination.

For the sake of full disclosure .... I only have one large (90 gal) bin containing commercially sourced red wiggler worm stock. All of my other bins contain worm stock "wild" harvested from massive piles of various manures that a local certified organic ranching operation piles up to age/compost before spreading out amoungst their various livestock grazing fields.

The amount of worms which so quickly invade these many small sized "mountains" of manure are beyond astonishing! They may be some local variant of red wiggler but one thing is for sure and that is they are most definitely a manure/composting worm species. They look and behave (within my bins anyhow) just like the commercially available red wigglers with a few exceptions. They sometimes have what appears to be a slight yellowish tinge of color to their "tail end". This coloration is much more pronounced when in the manure piles verses being in my bins for a length of time but this could be the result of multiple variables like lighting etc (ie: viewing under sunlight verses a dim light bulb etc)....And... The wild collected worms seem to congregate and/or feed at deeper depths than the commercial red wigglers and definitely have a preference/tollerence for much wetter conditions than those residing within my red wiggler bin.

I only mention my different worm sources as its certainly possible that it may make a difference with how quickly crab meal decomposes to where the worms can actually make use of it. I haven't personally noted much of a difference (if any) in the absorption of crab meal additions to any of my bins including the red wiggler one.

As with adding anything to an active vermicompost bin - Moderation is vital to success and using larger bins like myself can allow a much more forgiving response should the inevitable errors or erroneously thought out actions occur by the "keeper" which can at worst cause the worms harm and at best really piss them off making them all want to "bail ship".

Disclaimer: It's quite possible and maybe even likely that I don't have the slightest idea of what I'm doing or talking about. So as usual.... Always proceed with the utmost attitude of suspicious caution yet still maintain an open mind.

Crab Shells: A friend told me that it is good for plants and to bury them in the garden. I cannot be bothered to wash crab shells clean so I have always added them to my backyard composter. If rats get in there, so be it. At least it would not mess up my garden. It will take about a month to disappear. I also think all that crab "good" stuff left there that's not for human (or just me) consumption will convert to good rich compost.
However, the next time I buy crabs, I will wash the shell (not the leg-shells) and put it/them in my worm bin. They are a source of calcium.
What I have observed in the compost bin, with time the shells became brittle, I imagine from the "absorption" of acid in the pile. That's when I smashed them with my spade and found "volunteer" worms hiding.

otis11 that reads like a good night bedtime horror story for tiny, little future vermicomposterettes and vericomposterottes. It is just as terrifying as when grandma, the one with really big ears and teeth took off her nightcap and smiled at little red ridding hood.

In a bit of horror story of my own, when I am done stirring my cauldron of just less than simmering temperature marrow, joint, tail, back bones to make my bone broth. The same that I have grabbed a few chicken feet before they went into the pot. Pulled on the two tendons to make the chicken toes with long, pointy nails on, wiggle in an active grasping motion, made roaring dinosaur noises and as bad little boys are sometimes wan to do, chased my big sister around the house with her screaming like a girl in fear. LOL.

After boiling the bones a few times for a few days each time they are pretty brittle. The chicken bones are vanished. The rest should crush by hand or crush when put between two pieces of cardboard and driven over with my truck.

Sadly, nobody ever lets me do that. They insist the bones are garbage and need to be thrown away.

The closest I have gotten is biocharing a number of rib bones. I must report that when complete, they still smell, they are still a bit oily, but they do crush up mighty satisfyingly in just one hand. I'm pretty sure some wee beasties somewhere think they have died and gone to wee beastie heaven.

Crab shells I would wonder if the sun would be effective on. But I can relate to not wanting to see some worm bin additives every day for the rest of my life.

Those crab shell worms probably thought they were inside of an egg shell and had a bit of privacy. Their twosome is now a foursome.

Bio char, rock dust , mineral dust. Is there a need to consider adding this stuff to a bin even if you can find it. When I first received my worm factory they give you a fast start bedding group to start and included is a small bag of so called rock dust. To me sounds like a money grab. Here I am thinking we should just use left overs of what we already come in our everyday life. whether that be , horse manure, fruit scraps, veggie scraps, newspapers, cardboard, eggshells, etc. There are many vids online above mentioned rock dust that its the best thing since gold was discovered and the price to get it is not cheap. Well I dont have or use those first three Items I mentioned and my worms seem to be doing just fine and every thing I give them seems to be used . Im thinking the eggshells pulverized will suffice. The diet Im giving them will have to do as it seems to be working. Granted Im gradually learning a thing or two as time goes by from the ole experts on this forum and will continue to learn from hopefully.

Steve, from my uneducated perspective on this those three things you mentioned are all long lasting additives that will benefit soil health on ongoing terms. The second two by their availability to plants in a homogenized water soluble form and the first by providing both surface area for bacterial life and moisture holding capacity.

So castings without these additions will surely still be rich in bacterial life and nutrients for our plants in the near term though with these additions the usefulness of the castings can be extended over a greater span of time.

Rock Dust:

I consider it essential in both my soils and vermi bins for a myriad of reasons. The easiest explanation for this lazy gardener to explain in a few words would be as Nexev pointed out above ...... Rock dust provides a "home" or "anchor" for all the beneficial micro-beasties. Having said that ..... Your worms, soil and plants will very likely do just fine without it. Also, keep in mind that this additive is a "once and done" amendment. It's one of those rare amendments that will likely take many multiple lifetimes to break down or be "adsorbed". I use a ratio of about 3 or 4 cups per cubic foot of soil ... Others feel that ratio to be excessive so as always ..... YMMV.

Being the frugal individual I am (ie: cheap + poor ol' bastid) I also could not find any wisdom in purchasing rocks and shipping them just because they have been pulverized into a fine talcum like powder.

For me, one great allure of organics is to NOT use some cookie cutter recipe and simply buy all ingredients then mix as directed ....... BORING!

Improvisation and adaptation is good enough for Mom Nature so why not me? I only buy stuff for my garden or vermicompost bins on the very, very rare occasion that I simply must as it cant be found local, foraged, adapted, modified or substituted.

I'm betting that anyone reading this has access to some form of decent rock dust within a 1 hr drive of their house. Granite and or basalt are two great choices followed by glacial rock dust sooooooo....

Any rock quarries nearby? How about tombstone carvers? Or maybe granite countertop suppliers/fabricators/manufacturers? Landscape supply centers? Etc etc. Your options are only limited by your imagination and perseverance.
Of course one should always make sure that when using any manufacturing or fabrication "waste" product that its not contaminated with any form of chemical additive put there to help facilitate their work ... ie: lubricants, dye's, epoxy binders etc. Just ask them .... They will know

Now if one did live in the polar ice cap region and simply could not access rock dust without heavy equipment and explosives ...... Or their conformist training and consumeristic desires of instant gratification are so strong that they simply must follow others identically and therefore purchase ... ummmmm .. Rocks made into very fine dust. Then I would highly recommend .... rockdustlocal.com

Its probably one of if not the most reasonably priced places for one to purchase rock dust anywhere within the USA and it's all sourced/shipped right from your own various regional localized sources. Localy sourcing materials is important so your not shipping rocks clear across country which in my feeble mind is seriously selfish and incredibly wasteful of our limited resources .... Oh.... And not to mention stupid expensive.

No... I'm not afiliated in any way with this supplier. But I do think its an interesting business model.

Disclaimer: It's quite possible and maybe even likely that I really don't have the slightest idea of what I'm doing or talking about. So as usual.... Always proceed with the utmost attitude of suspicious caution ... yet still maintain the wisdom of an open mind.

Ok so I by passed the "220 million" for a long while and now that I viewed it interesting info. Appears Im limited as I have no source for true horse manure.. I mainly just have the kitchen scraps, cardboard , shredded paper, melon rinds, egg shells and cornmeal. Not likely I would add toenails.

The other day I was weeding out old credit cards from mybins which were blue . I had forgotten that I had those go thru my shredder and added to my bin along with junk mail. Im sure toenails would end up the same way.

I dont eat crabs so those shells wont end up in my bins. I need to work a little harder to see if I can find a source of horse manure. If I understand this correctly though that item by itself is not all its cracked up to be . Many have claimed it to be the total package in one food source but after viewing this vid blows the lid off that theory. So how many of us who think we are feeding and getting a max result from our castings actually have a long way to go.

Here is a pic I took of two abalone shells. The largest is over 9" long. The shells are usually pretty thick and tough.
I put these shells in a bin when I first started for fun. Worms quickly took up residence, and shells became a favorite spot. These shells were continually in worm bins and castings for about 3 years, getting recycled back at harvest.
It's amazing to see abalone shells break down like this.

I am going to a crab-feed this weekend with 2500 lbs of crab served. The shells would be a good score for worms if someone wanted to hot compost them first. That would likely smell really bad!

Good luck and have fun.

Pete

mendopete, I'm noticing GardenWeb does not have a like button. I'll make one.

LIKE!

.

With the title of the thread being "Food Stock Variety" I can say I this is certainly variety. I have never read another post that talked about abalone shell never mind one that showed pictures. It must have been like being inside an ostrich egg for the worms.

I'll second EQ's "LIKE" and raise it to a very rare "eFing AMAZING!!"

Thank you very much MendoPete for not only sharing your little experiment but for also sharing that simply mind blowing picture!!!

For complete appreciation of such miracles of vermicomposting and microbe wrangling, one should understand (should they not be familiar with abalone)...... Their shells are simply incredibly dense, thick and heavy.

Truly a testament to the shear power worms and microbes have when working in unison ..... All told in one simple picture.

Love it!

For those that may have been worried about what to do as far as food if they would be gone for an extended time , Im sure as someone else mentioned there is already going to be a lot of food in your bin that we cant see. Also that is a good reason for keeping a nice fluffy layer of moist shredded or not newsprint and can and will always munch at on that for quite some time , just sayin.

chuckiebtoo: Easy to admire is the well defined duel system capability specifically designed right into the very structure thus making vermicompost comparison analysis much easier for those not used to the more difficult and less simplified multi system conglomerations we so often see being bounced around . There will be no bouncing with this worm errr... house. What do you call it? Until you decide I am nick naming it DTABOR for Duel Testing Arbitrator Box Of Reason. Twin compartments will securely keep test material separate while maintaining identical situational enviornments of temperature, moisture, humidity, noise, vibration, light, and even the tilt could easily be adjusted to the same precise degree off horizontal. I imagined during the first six viewings of the picture above my mutant side loved that this new system can compost up two sides at once. So at least two of us get what we want. Like a great board. The size of each compartment is just right along with the inside Contour. Pure genius chuckiebtoo, possibly evil. Why did somebody here not think of this simple yet elegant system before. Why didn't I think of it? Momma always said "Life was like a box of chocolates." I hate it when I can't like a post six times. This is gonna take a while to eighty six.

~ Sara Oscar Sidner

CB2 - From my many weeks of vermicomposting experience I have to say, IMO, that your attempt at adding some grit may be a little oversized. At least I'd hate to see the size worm that could consume that block.

A smattering of confusion seems to have enveloped this conversation with a cloud of indecisiveness with regard to the things we choose to add to the environments we create for our worms. Smattering being both an awesome, but little used adjective to describe the amount of total havoc being wreaked upon vermicomposting in general, and our vermicomposters in particular.

I thought about this situation for a couple of minutes after reading the immediate response to my most recent post here and decided to re-read the complete thread because all of us are guilty sometimes of reading a little bit of a thread if we feel like it which gives us sometimes skewed ideas about what the hell is going on in the thread....because, you know, a thread is a series of, uh...threadettes.

Now, if I may for a moment become serious, let me say this: All that rhetoric you will stumble upon in the vastness of the "information" floating around out there about worming is, like life, many times ridiculously full of sh*t.

But let me explain: Because worms are composters of organic materials, all organic materials theoretically can be composted by worms. That is not to say that worms will opt to compost materials like say.....toenails, or sea creature shells, or concrete blocks if organic options like fruit or veggies or materials pre-composted by creatures like horses are available to them on the same menu. In fact, it is a reliable and easily provable fact that such is not the case.

In olden times, when guys were without TV's, or PC's, or VCR's, Google, laptops, libraries, Ask.com, porno, or stuff to occupy their time, they would go out into the open and try to prove to themselves that stuff they were thinking about could be true, or maybe not. That's how they learned that certain stuff was, and remains, less desirable as a consumable than stuff that laid around forever being dis-interesting to any organic composting critters.

One exception......the termite....is out there dispelling lots of everything I've just said. I can only offer as a explanation that the termite is an anomaly.

Worms wanna eat good stuff. Faster composting is better than erosion-speed "composting", which is...erosion. Now, when toenails, and bones, and hair, and a grandpa in a casket are placed in an out-of-the-way place to proceed with...erosion, composting worms are never part of the equation.

We vermicomposters are trying to fool Mother Nature by speeding up the process of composting by maximizing the rate of composting. Concrete blocks offer little incentive to the wormies.

People (entities) who sometimes offer suggestions that certain organic materials can be viable stuff to use in vermicomposting systems do so because a wealth of those materials are laying around where they are. That's why foodstuff materials are highly recommended by peeps with lots of those waste foodstuffs laying around. Same for pedicurists, hairdressers, and shellfishermen, as well as masonry workers. .

And lastly, never put stuff into your worm homes that you don't wanna deal with for any length of time with your hands.

cb2

I mis-remembered. It wasn't a box of chocolates mama said. Must of been somebody else's of mama. My mama said I was Dumber Than A Box Of Rocks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiBGX6HDZSQ 0:05 to 0:10

In staying with the theme of the original author of this thread referring to a little more balance of food yesterday I fixed the eggshells I had on hand pulverized it and added some corn meal to it. In checking the bins today I see the worms are all over the new mix spread out evenly over the bins. Usually I will see them more congregated where the food is . So whether you wish to call it just grit or a combo food and grit they were loving it. I admit I had not give them this treat for a while. Guess I need to add it more often.

Along with being composters of organic matter worms homogenize mineral matter into that compost so finely dispersed making it soluble so that plants have immediate access to it.

Curious to see if you get results with your cinderblock like Pete did with those abalone shells.

CB2;
The D in DTABOR is Dual. Duel is two worms facing off against each other with Swords or Pistols.

Shaul (aka shaul_gw)

Charity:

Please try to PM ( send me a private message ) . One of my emails is on this site,

accessible by clicking on the icon where a photo would go.

@Barbara - I've been away for a few months dealing with cancer treatments. Just saw this comment. I can't find your email to PM you.